Research Projects

The rice-wheat rotation is practiced over 10.5 mha of IGP and covers 4.1 mha in north-west India (NAAs 2017). The majority of field operation of RW rotation are mechanized except the transplanting of paddy. Although the paddy transplanters are available for this purpose however, their adoption is lower and one of the major bottleneck to adoption of paddy transplanters is raising of mat type nursery. The raising of mat type nursery is laborious it requires lot a labor to cut mats of nursery, transportation of nursery mats to field and loading in the paddy transplanter. Moreover, it is difficult to raise mat type nursery in hot and humid weather of North-West India. Due to this, the farmers prefer the manual transplanting of paddy using the wash root type nursery. However, manual transplantation is labor intensive, requiring 250-350 man-hours per hectare, accounting for 25% of the total labor demand for crops, sutar (2022). Manual transplanting is challenging in process as 1) transplanting pose is arduous 2) labour has to bear with extreme environmental conditions (temperature and humidity) and 3) labor has to walk in puddled muddy field. The paddy transplanters of wash root type nursery planting are not available in India as these require a precise operation of holding bare paddy plant from its root and planting in the puddled field. It is very difficult to achieve the singulation of nursery using the traditional mechanical mechanisms. Detecting objects in an image is a crucial aspect in the development of agricultural automation applications. (Oppenheim et al, 2016). Detection of wash root paddy nursery seedlings opens the possibility of transplanting seedlings from a bundle in real time using robotic arm. The sigulation of wash root paddy nursery is possible with machine vision algorithms using Jetson single chip computers coupled with robotic arm made of dc servos. Therefore, there is a need to develop a machine vision based transplanter using robotic arm for planting wash root type paddy nursery in the field.